For years we’ve been hearing story after story about the importance of conserving honeybees – specifically the European Honeybee, Apis mellifera. Then on 26 January 2018, Science magazine published “Conserving honey bees does not help wildlife” by Jonas Geldmann and Juan P. González-Varo, in which the authors reported that “managed honey bees can harm wild pollinator species.” It turns out that the non-native European Honeybees don’t need to be conserved nearly as much as the native species of pollinators do.
Paige Embry was already ahead of the curve in this. She’s long been interested in the conservation of native bees, and in her newly published Our Native Bees; America’s Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them, she presents what she’s learned from interviews conducted with entomologists, farmers, gardeners, and others on the subject, as well as describing some of the programs that are being undertaken to conserve these important and too-long overlooked creatures.
